The present invention relates generally to electronic communications.
Networks provide communication sessions between clients and servers where, generally speaking, clients request information provided by servers. Some networks provide a high degree of security, so that messages passing between clients and servers are protected from unauthorized interception, reading, or tampering. Other networks, particularly more public networks such as the Internet, do not themselves necessarily protect from unauthorized reception of messages. Communications sessions and messages can be encoded to lend a degree of protection.
As accessibility to the Internet from remote locations continues to become more widely available and convenient, utilizing the Internet to perform tasks such as remotely accessing electronic mail and databases becomes increasingly desirable. Some methods have been developed to allow a remote user to establish secure communications sessions. For example, a variety of encryption methods have been developed at several network levels, such as at the transport protocol level (with, e.g., HTTPS) and the application level (with, e.g., encryption of transported files).
Servers on public networks are also vulnerable to discovery by unauthorized users, who can attempt to gain access to such servers to obtain otherwise confidential information. Fire walls have been developed which help protect against unwanted intruders. Users, after logging onto a public network server, can be identified by any of a number of schemes (e.g., passwords), and then be transferred to other servers to access more sensitive information.